Wednesday, 23 July 2014

Oakley review is out: some initial comments

The review’s terms of reference were always
too tight. This was a common theme of criticism from organisations that
responded to the consultation earlier this year.

But a wider ranging review of sanctioning
would inevitably have called into question the policy itself and the principle
of ‘conditionality’ that underlies it.

These are emphatically not up for review
yet. The report’s author, Matthew Oakley, is himself committed to the current
policy of sanctions (Donkey Passim)

Oakley’s report includes references to the consultation
responses and the Child Poverty Action Group has a page on its website where many
of the responses can be read. Most of the responses criticized the tight terms
of reference.

There were rumours going around that Oakley
was going to step beyond the narrow confines of his remit and he hints at this
in saying that the report has implications for sanctioned claimants across the
board, not just those on the work programme. But I’ll have to read it more
closely.

Oakley’ review was about the way conditionality
and sanctions are communicated, it was a review of the processes, in itself
this is no small issue. Communication between advisors, claimants, local
authorities and others who interface with the policy of conditionality and its
attendant sanctions, is awful. From the dreadful job seekers agreement, the
woeful ‘job seekers diary,’ which is a regular source of ‘raised doubts’
against claimants (I know of claimants who have been threatened with a sanction
for failing to include a job reference in their diary). The squalid
relationships that exist between claimants and their advisors to the almost
willfully poor letter writing on behalf of work programme providers and the DWP
itself - the system works terribly and Oakley makes some important
recommendations on some of these processes.

But the truth is that an orgy of
sanctioning activity is taking place in job centres right now. Since October
2012 when it upped the expectation on job centre managers that they would
punish more people, sanctions have gone through the roof. No amount of
‘behavioural’ approaches to communication (as recommended by Oakley) will make
a difference to a policy like this. It is the deliberate decision to ramp up
sanctioning activity in October 2012 that needs sorting, not how those
sanctions are ‘communicated’.